Objects, Animals, and Personhood (Womanhood Especially) in Musil and Lispector

Clarice Lispector. Look at those seeing eyes!

I have been reading Clarice Lispector's novel, The Besieged House, newly translated by Johnny Lorenz and published by New Directions. And this after just being so immersed in my own translations of Musil's two novellas in Unions. All of the stories depict women who are deeply preoccupied with objects, subjectivity, animals, and the sometimes fluid, sometimes rigid boundaries between them. For another essay I was writing, on women who like to look, the good parts of objectification, female mate choice in the animal world, and the animistic vision of things, I had been thinking about all of this for some time, remembering all of the brilliant depictions of objects coming to life in Modernist fiction, objects with trembling boundaries, objects that then play dead or dumb as their suspicious "owners" try to glimpse their fugitive aliveness. Consider Hofmannstahl's famous "Lord Chandos Letter" and his less famous "Letter from One Who Has Returned" (which you can read here in my translation: https://issuu.com/contramundum/docs/hfa___9.1.2015 ), or the things seen dissolving and coming back into form in so many Virginia Woolf novels; consider the gaze of Malte Laurids Brigge in Rilke's novel, the nauseated narrator who is learning to see, or Sartre's Roquentin. In Musil's two novellas in Unions, the objects sometimes mock the fraught women who gaze upon them, sometimes bring comfort in their solidity and seeming unconsciousness (oh, to be an unconscious thing, the women seem to think, without my constant analyzing neuroses!), and in the opening scene in the first novella, they echo the harmony between the married couple in a shimmering almost still-life, its stillness only interrupted by the sound of tea hitting the bottom of a china cup. And for the heroine of Lispector's novel, Lucrecia, who feels she must work very hard to constantly see objects, delineate and name them, keep them in their places, or even to somehow create and recreate them in her dreams, the object world is a constant obsession. Since this is a blog and not an academic paper, I am not going to bother to furnish examples from the texts. Believe me, they are there. Find them yourselves if you just graze the pages!
     Animals, too, are essential to the women in these stories, most obviously to Veronica in the second novel in Musil's Unions and to Lucrecia in Lispector's novel, but also to Claudine of "The Completion of Love," whose reflections often turn to animal metaphors, and to the question of animal consciousness/unconsciousness, and to the sometimes tenuous and even dissolved boundary between human and animal desire. Lucrecia's animals are horses, and she imagines at times that she herself is a horse, walking on hooves. Veronica, of course, concentrates on some chickens copulating before her eyes and a memory of a beloved dog, but general animal metaphors are rife, as she wishes she could be like an animal, simply doing things (particularly erotic or maybe violent things) without consciousness, compunction, or social awareness or consequence.
    What is going on here? Why all these objects, why these animals? And what could it all have to do with the other concerns (philosophical, erotic, narrative, aesthetic, social) of these works of fiction? Reading Lispector has helped me to clarify some presentiments that were haunting me in Unions. Benjamin Moser, who edited The Besieged City and wrote its introduction, opines that Lucrecia represents the objecthood of women in Lispector's novel, that Lispector is embodying Simone de Beauvoir's concept of the objectified woman who is seen but does not see. Strange that he says this, since most of the novels pages are filled with Lucrecia seeing! Yes, she is orchestrating her role and her pose as a woman in a world where her attractiveness is important to her identity, but she is much more. She is the agent and the subject of her own objectivity and the objectivity of the world, the city, the people and things around her. She is, in fact, an artist of her world, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, but her self-appointed task is to see and to create the city and herself, so they may be seen by others. That is the work of an artist. And the creation of a woman writer, who herself is doing just that. Just as many readers might see Claudine, of Musil's "The Completion of Love" as an object of the predatory male gaze, helpless and victimized, I see her as an agent of her own desires, who is engaged in a quest to discover her self through a risky experiment. She gives her self or at least her body to men to test her own boundaries, to find her self and to "complete" the very strong love she has for her husband. She is not a victim, but a woman experimenting with the boundaries of her own autonomy by transgressing them.
    Lucrecia is a virgin and for her everything is still frustratingly held at bay. She feels the space between self and other person and other thing almost painfully. I feel that something in her longs for and is terrified of being besieged, being displaced by another's presence in her body and mind. A man inside one's body and mind tends to push one's self out of the way (not to mention a baby, which literally sucks a mother's consciousness and life-blood!), or at least to fill up a great deal of who one is. To become one with another person is both an eclipse of and an expansion of self (in "The Completion," the narrator suggests that by merging together Claudine and her husband cut off the world, but expand the space inside their two-selves; also, they seem to cut off roads to different abandoned but still hearkening parts of themselves that cannot live within the new structure of the marriage). When Claudine goes on a solitary journey, she comes back to her self and the abandoned parts haunt her.  Veronica, who is a virgin like Lucrecia, discovers her sensuality, which was confused between the attentions of two men. Lucrecia, lone, separate, inviolate, virginal, never yet breached by another, feels awkwardly out of touch with the things and people outside her borders. She is hyper vigilant about her own role of keeping the world in order. What cataclysm awaits were the world, the city, her body, besieged?  How is such a siege accomplished? Will it hurt? Will I still be myself? Will I still be whole? Or will I finally be made whole?
   Yeats said that Virginity renews itself with the moon. Thus all lovers know that the renewal of the act of love and the pauses in between does not solve the problem of self and other, or of animality and consciousness, or personhood and objecthood, subjectivity and objectivity, but that all of conscious life is an interplay between all of these states and that one must find multiple perspectives and ways of seeing (and being seen), all valid, but some more life-affirming and more fruitful than others. These woman are searching for the best ways to be their selves with others, in and out of the world. No easy task for anyone, but possibly more challenging for women, or for women who affirm their own role in making the world through seeing.
   I will come back and conclude when I have finished reading Lispector's novel, but for now I reach out my hand to you in an invitation to consider these questions with me....